I often run into situations where I want to put a ProShow Producer montage on a DVD along with an Adobe Premiere created video (as separate menu items). For example, I often put a wedding montage on the same DVD as a complete video of the wedding ceremony. There is really no practical way to use ProShow to create such a DVD. In this case I use Adobe Encore to author the DVD. Although this sounds simple, there is a real gotcha with attempting to use Encore with ProShow created files. The problem is that my version of Encore (the one that came with CS5.5) incorrectly interprets the ProShow file as upper field first (the file is actually lower field first). Thus, if you bring the ProShow file directly into Encore you end up with a juddering montage that looks terrible because of the reversed fields. In order to deal with this situation, I bring the ProShow file into Premiere and tell Premiere to interpret the file as lower field first (Premiere gives you this ability -- Encore does not). I then re-export the file from Premiere to come up with a file for Encore that will be correctly interpreted. This works to create smooth montages using Encore as the authoring tool, but it does so with a degradation in quality (because of the forced re-export). It is also a hassle to go through these steps every time I make a change to the montage.

I am wondering if anyone has come up with a better solution to this problem. For example, I don't know how Encore determines the field order of files that are imported into it. If it is reading some header information in the ProShow file, then perhaps a tool that allowed me to quickly change the header information without re-encoding the file would be a good solution.

Has anyone else run into this problem, and if so, have you come up with a better workaround?

If you export from Producer as an mpeg file it cannot be burned by Encore without transcoding as you have discovered. And that transcoding can degrade the image quality due to decompressing and then recompressing the mpeg file during transcoding.

I've had good luck exporting my DVD productions as an uncompressed AVI. They are big files so you need to make sure you had enough room for them. I convert the AVI files to mpeg in Premiere Pro and then import to Encore.

With Blu-Ray productions I have not found any way to export from Producer other than by mpeg. All the other export formats I've tried either crash or produce corrupt files. I have a MainConcept plugin for Premiere Pro that will convert the Producer mpegs (both DVD and Blu-Ray) to a format that Encore will burn without transcoding. That conversion (called Smart Rendering) does not require decompressing and recompressing the mpeg file so there is no quality loss.

I've started to use this method for both DVDs and Blu-Rays so I avoid the very large uncompressed AVIs for DVD productions. Producer's mpeg output is of very good quality as long as I select the proper settings. But I would have continued to go the uncompressed AVI route if I were not doing Blu-Rays as well. The MainConcept plugin is not cheap!